As-built floor plans are useful for a variety of applications. Manual surveys to collect this data for building management tasks typically combine computer-aided design (CAD) with laser tape measures. These methods can be slow and, by employing human preconceptions of buildings as collections of straight lines, do not always accurately describe the true nature of a modeled space.
Another known technology useful for generating as-built floor plans employs portable laser range-finders that gather LIDAR data coupled with simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithms. Using SLAM, it is possible to swiftly and accurately survey buildings of sizes and complexities that would take orders of magnitude longer to survey manually. However, a need remains for increasing the accuracy of generated floor plans without significantly expanding the computational requirements of SLAM algorithms used in the process, especially for very large floor plans.